CandyColoured Dreamcoat
by Scribbler
Summary: [one shot] Berzerker doesn't care much for Bayville. Which isn't to say he doesn't care about anything in it. [RayKitty]


**Disclaimer **– If they were mine, I'd be all flustered and stuttery.

**Spoilers -** None. At least, not really.

**Continuity **– Somewhere between mid-Season Three and the end of Season Four.

**A/N **- For Shadow Diva, who made me a beautiful Ray/Tabby desktop. _Strokes pretty-pretty desktop._

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**Candy-Coloured Dreamcoat**

© Scribbler, December 2004

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"I look like shit."

"Well _I_ think you scrub up nice."

Ray tried to stop his collar from asphyxiating him and glared at his reflection. Of all the ways he'd ever envisioned himself, this was not one of them. He didn't usually envision himself at all, but when self-image did cross his mind he pictured was what he usually saw – baggy pants, sandals, one of the loose shirts perennially falling off their hangars in his closet. Future versions of himself followed the same pattern, only maybe with slicked hair and a tie. Once, he'd had a nightmare about cardigan sweaters TV dads wore, but that was about as heinous as things got.

This? This was whole new levels of monstrous.

A pair of slender hands appeared on his shoulders. Kitty was shorter than him, meaning when she stood behind him he could only see the reflection her ponytail. And since she'd let her hair loose tonight, not even that.

"We already discussed this. I paid for the hire of this suit months ago, so they _should_ have got the sizing right. It's not my fault the clerk's handwriting totally stinks."

Ray wasn't convinced. "Dances aren't really my scene - "

"Your 'scene' is a dingy bedroom with grunge music and posters of naked women." Her voice turned coy and slightly pleading. "Please, Ray? I only get one more Spring Formal, and my history with them hasn't exactly been spectacular."

He couldn't argue with that, recalling several years' worth of disastrous social gathering. Dragon monsters, invading pyromaniacs, some idiots trying to set fire to her dress, being drenched in half-melted tripe, pelted with stones, an upended tin of dog food over her tiara, and the general anti-mutant rhetoric that followed them wherever they went. Oh yeah, and Alvers, but that was a whole other thing he didn't like to think about.

He sighed. "I hate tuxedoes."

Kitty's face crept into view. She'd had her hair styled into lots of fiddly curls and ringlets that framed her face like a garland of honeysuckle. "I know. The things you do for me." Then she winked.

He rolled his eyes and offered her his arm.

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Ray didn't care for Bayville.

He hadn't been born there, hadn't grown up there, but somehow he'd ended up in this picket-fenced speck of suburbia. And he wasn't fond.

Tolerant. Now there was a word.

Patient was another.

Patience only ran so far, though.

It seemed a little off and a little unfair. He was never going to be Cyclops, and she was never going to be Jean Grey. They wouldn't be the next Golden Couple. They wouldn't even make silver. Even bronze is pushing it.

Suburbia didn't agree with Ray. City life he could deal with, but the _pettiness_ of suburbia… Who had the best car? Whose windows shone brightest? Whose kid made the track team? Whose needless black briefcase snapped shut fastest?

City folk didn't care about that. They cared about a, b and c. They cared about getting home in one piece each night, putting food on the table and not jumping from thirty stories up because the bottom fell out their bank account. There was a visceral reality about the city, the _real_ city, which suburbia could only imitate. And even then only after having it declawed first.

No, Ray didn't care for Bayville.

He cared for it even less tonight.

"Well," said Kitty, "at least I have a perfect record for dances."

He grunted and leaned up against a wall – not because he was tired, but because she'd pulled a Cinderella and left one of her shoes on the staircase outside the main entrance to the school. She panted a little, bracing her hand against a tree and fingering the heel of her remaining shoe. It was turned up towards her, leg at an odd angle.

There was a ladder in her tights and grass stains on her dress. Her lip had split in the scuffle.

"Bastards," Ray muttered suddenly, savagely. "Pricks."

Kitty looked at him from behind her hair. The ringlets were coming out, and the little white flowers were in all the wrong places. "There was still no need to hit them."

"They had it coming." He felt the inside of his mouth with his tongue. His left cheek was already starting to swell, and the cut on his forehead throbbed a little. No matter. He'd had worse. And they _had_ had it coming.

They _had_.

Kitty's leg dropped and she hobbled over. "I am _never_ gonna get my deposit back on this thing," she murmured, picking at his collar. The tie was long gone, the shoulder of his jacket torn and muddy. He hadn't had time to take it off before wading in. "Reckon Ororo can do those invisible stitches on this? Once the repair bill gets to a certain price you just have to buy the darn thing."

She wasn't even talking about it. She wasn't meeting his eyes, either.

Ray arched an eyebrow and let her prod the almost-certainly-ruined suit. He could pay the tab out of his student stipend. Xavier gave one to each of them, and he'd barely touched his in weeks. Not much point in going out in Bayville. All you got was a sugar-coated fifties throwback, or a mediocre shopping mall packed full of enough vitriol to fill a million poison pens.

He had a flashback to the mansion's library, sitting in the window seat and trying to understand what was so damn fascinating about Jane Austen instead of going to CD Warehouse.

He still didn't get it.

He didn't get a lot of things.

Like how people thought that hiding their mouths behind their hands was enough to block their voices. Even their teammates, who should have known better – whisper, whisper, whisper, trying to figure them out, like they were some Rubric's Cube just waiting to be solved. Get one side right, and everything else was freakin' wrong.

"I bet they're listening to music."

"Sharing headphones?"

"You betcha."

"No, wait - I bet they're doing each other's _hair_!"

That one always got a laugh. Ha ha. Because he had funny hair, and who could have predicted she had a soft spot for Rammstein?

Kitty also had hair. Not funny and spiky and different colours like his, but… he liked her hair. Even when it was falling out of its style and straggling more like brambles than honeysuckle. She didn't have any split ends, and it always smelled nice, like ginseng or lavender. He _liked_ playing with her hair, and he liked that doing that didn't have to mean anything at all.

"Uh, Ray?"

"Hm?"

"Not that I'm not, like, used to it? But you haven't said anything for the last five minutes. And my feet are cold."

He shook himself back to reality and let air hiss between his teeth. He was going to have one hell of a shiner in the morning. Maybe the cracks would change from hair and headphones to 'Kitty kiss it all better'.

Well, fuck 'em.

She yelped as he turned around and hoisted her onto his back.

"Hold on tight."

"Um, okay. But I'm not sure where to put my hands so I won't, like, choke you."

She still wasn't talking about it.

He got the feeling she never would.

"Here." Twisting a little, he positioned her hands so he wouldn't asphyxiate.

He paused. He'd thought the collar would do that. Funny how things turned out.

Ha ha.

When they got home and got cleaned up, he was going to brush her hair. Long, careful strokes with that embossed hairbrush from her care package last Fall – the one with all the photo albums in it that she never showed to anyone but him. Not even Kurt.

He started walking into the nighttime variety of this candy-coloured suburbia, with its motion-sensor lights and Mercedes Benzes with the steering wheel locks and all that other stuff these small-minded people couldn't do without.

No, he didn't care much for Bayville.

But he stuck around anyway.

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FINIS.

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End file.
